Among the government branches, our judiciary is the lone thread of hope, a cradle of equity in the people’s desire for a fair shake. They won’t get it anywhere else – not from a legislature that bathes in the twin-convulsions of xenophobia and holy writ, or a governor who sees himself at once emporer and pontiff.

The courts are an instrument and arbiter of law, and without our courts there is no law, and with no law we are left to the whims and fantasy of a legislature run amok and a governor deluded with his own prejudice – rubes come home to the barnyard and Captain Queeg, clacking his marbles, convinced that the money is all there, if only we would look for it. More twin-convulsions, of missing strawberries and Glide Paths to Zero.

The state courts, and now the Kansas Supreme Court, decline to indulge either the governor or his flock of lemming legislators, preferring to administer and interpret the law as a sacred trust, rather than wax for the molding of lunatic idealogues.

For this fair shake, for viewing the citizenry as fundamental to government and law as the instrument of justice, legislators and the governor would punish the courts for lack of allegiance to their private fantasies, their personal holy writ, their concoction of how things must be – as opposed to how the law demands that they are.

The legislature and the governor would deny funding for the courts’ budget, remove the appropriations that keep the lights on and clerks, judges and juries working at courthouses across Kansas. By this they would extinguish the lights of justice and darkness, then, looms for us all.

Here now is the difference between suppression and expression, between tyranny and freedom. The courts stand for wise laws and free interpretation and thus, for free expression of the wisdom (and even, at times, folly) of the people. The governor, his legislators and their like, would accuse the courts of disloyalty for declining to follow their dictates – more specifically, their demands to outlaw abortion, and to strangle the funding for local public schools. The courts have ruled repeatedly that our laws do not grant such demands, nor others like them.

The courts are following the wisdom in free expression and the laws that insist upon that freedom; they belong to no one man or woman, no political party, no race or creed or cause. The state today is in danger, not from the courts but from their suppression, because in the end suppression will lead to tyranny and tyranny to violence, to the killing of something that is dear to the heart of all citizens, not a few of them.

Kansas is at a crossroads. We can be free, and insist upon our freedom through the courts and their full funding, or we can fall to the tyranny of people who believe the only justice is their brand of justice, their proscription for freedom, a course that, like that infamous Glide Path to Zero, will take the governor, his administration and his legislature down to an abysm of political dishonor never before reached in this state’s history. And us with them. Is this what we want?